Sticks and stones... Racial slurs or free speech?

RMIT and the University of Melbourne recently conducted a year long research into free speech. The authors of the 49-page report Love Thy Neighbours have called for innovative educational programs to “challenge this group” after finding nearly half the adolescent and young adult males commonly cited their right to freedom of speech in defence of expressing their intolerance.

Co-author Rivka Witenberg, a psychologist and academic reported in The Age, said those who cited freedom of speech regarded it as a “queen” of rights, not to be subordinated to others. She said she opposed censorship. She believed in the need to encourage “a logical reasonable understanding that freedom of speech needs to have some moral limits to it”.

Dr Witenberg said Australia's education system might be credited with a higher level of tolerance among young Australians than she had found in studies in Israel and the Ukraine. She said free speech had been raised in the other studies, but the extent to which it was cited in the Australian study “came completely out of the blue”.

The report, soon to be released by the Australian Multicultural Foundation, and based on findings from 374 students from schools, universities and TAFEs in Victoria, says boys aged 15 and 16 were those least accepting of "differences". Obviously this academic is not Indigenous or of dark complexion, because if she was she’d know what it was like to be humiliated, insulted and demeaned at the hands of cowardly non-Indigenous people in gangs or an intimidating bully, as he or she dishes out their vitriol in the playground, on the bus, at a nightclub or at the weekend footy.

Try telling parents of the victims of racial vilification that they and their child should turn the other cheek as their circumstances can only get better. Try telling an Indigenous spouse in an intolerant relationship that the racial abuse (physical or verbal) from their partner and his or her family will eventually improve. Try telling Indigenous employees who are subjected to daily overt and covert forms of work place racial taunts that their future will take a turn for the better - just hang in there and don’t rock the boat.

Race hate offenses are no longer exclusively packaged as physical assaults but are there for the target group to see in the form of graffitti on public and private property, on SMS messages, voice mail, email, answering machines, notes deposited in school lockers or text books, on toilet walls and a multitude of other innovative places cowardly perpetrators find to display their depravity.

The racial slur boong, coon, abo, gin are words I’ve campaigned against for many years in the court room and through public forums including the media. The slur that I believe that sits at the top of the tree universally is the highly offensive word “nigger”. There are many theories as to the origin of the odious word “nigger” but one thing is certain is that it was firmly entrenched in Australia as a degenerative nickname in the early 1800s. Today it remains a principal symbol of white racism regardless of who is using it. The African American Registry refers to the term as:

Historically, nigger defined, limited, made fun of, and ridiculed Blacks. It was a term of exclusion, a verbal reason for discrimination. Whether used as a noun, verb, or adjective, it strengthened the stereotype of the lazy, stupid, dirty, worthless nobody. No other American surname carries as much purposeful cruelty.

Australia’s renowned historian Henry Reynolds 2001 publication The question of genocide in Australia’s history - An Indelible Stain? provides an instance of the derogatory manner in which a high ranking government official, Archibald Meston (1851-1924),made use of "nigger" in his vernacular in an address to Queensland’s parliament:

… those who know the nigger best feel most the impossibility of doing much to ameliorate his condition or protract the existence of his race. This callousness as a rule arises from no lack of sympathy with the blacks, but from a firm conviction that their stage of civilization is too many hundred perhaps thousand years behind our own to allow their race to thrive side by side with ours.

On the other hand academic Rosalind Kidd’s 1997 book The Way We Civilise provides a look (a rather flimsy one at that) at a compassionate oratory on the use of the offending word:

1913. A Kuranda businessmen lobbied against any removal of local Aborigines, declaring them to be a “wonderful little tribe of niggers … a strictly moral tribe pure blood and on a fair increase”.

Today it is impossible for parents and consumers of television and music to not hear Hip Hop music whose artists’ have a propensity for the use of the n-word. Recently I inadvertently heard a young white boy say to his Aboriginal friend, “What’s up my Nigga”; my response was predictable but I was aghast that the two buddies could not fathom my disparaging remark. Am I getting too old and out of touch with the real world - is this the way young kids talk to each other today?

African American Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy’s publication Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word came under public attack from prominent black activists when it was released by Random House in January 2003.

One irate activist said Kennedy ticks off the litany of defences many blacks cite to justify using the word. They claim that it is a term of endearment or affection. They say to each other, “You're my nigger if you don't get no bigger”. Or “That nigger sure is something”. Others use it in anger or disdain: “Nigger, you sure got an attitude.” Still others are defiant. They say they don't care what a white person calls them, since words can't harm them.

Kennedy understands, even sympathises with, their defence; he has no truck with those who want to purge the word from public discourse, wage war against its presence in such classics as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, encode it in hate-speech laws, and impose penalties and sanctions on professors, basketball coaches and public officials who use it, no matter how instructive or benevolent their intentions.

But in his passionate plea to recast public thinking and debate over the word, Kennedy makes the same mistake as other n-word apologists. Words are not value-neutral. They express concepts and ideas. Often words reflect society's standards. If colour-phobia is a deep-rooted standard in American life, then a word as emotionally charged as “nigger” will always reinforce and perpetuate stereotypes. It can't be sanitised, cleansed, inverted or redeemed as culturally liberating.

Are Australians becoming more indulgent of racist language or is it a passing fad or a vogue thing brought about by the latest American inspired Hip Hop crowd?

Alan Matheson, ACTU International Officer, in his March 1993 report identified a study which suggests “40 per cent of Australian university students believed their fellow students were racist”. While another indicates that “the issue is not among the top five issues of concern for young people”. One survey sees a “massive 49 per cent increase” in racist incidents of violence and vandalism while another concludes that there has been “a decline in the occurrence of incidents”.

Almost all of the State Government equal opportunity commissions and anti discrimination boards report a significant increase in complaints of discrimination and racism in the workplace. Yet annual report after report of Federal Government departments, indicate only one or two formal complaints of discrimination in their departments.

On the one hand, each of the State government agencies concludes that the racism and discrimination in the workplace is endemic, yet after nearly ten years there is no national strategy in place to combat such discrimination. One meeting of the National Committee on Discrimination in Employment took place in 1993; it has little administrative support and no resources.

So who are we kidding when so many conflicting reports are doing the rounds and being well packaged by the media spin doctors to suit the political agenda of the day?

Take West Australian Senator Lightfoot, who was found by a Federal Court Judge to have made racist comments. Costs of $10,000 were awarded against him. Lightfoot did not defend the charge at the hearing. “If you want to pick out some aspects of Aboriginal culture, which are valid in the 21st century, that aren't abhorrent, that don't have some of the terrible sexual and killing practices in them, I'd be happy to listen to those” Lightfoot told the media at the time.

Perhaps the Editorial in the West Australian best depicts this elected official:

His contribution to State politics might be summed up as dismal self-promotion and his career at Federal level has been no more edifying. He has found notoriety by an ugly recourse to race-based remarks about Aboriginals in what he calls their native state.

If that wasn’t bad enough I read recently in a news brief where a group of prominent Adelaide leaders demanded the sacking of the Aboriginal affairs minister, Michael Armitage, over his use of the words “nigger in the wood pile” in Parliament on November 22, 2004. Premier Dean Brown met with 14 representatives of Aboriginal groups who all said that the minister should be replaced. Brown apologised for the comments and conceded that they were “insensitive” but rejected calls for Armitage's removal.

Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement director Sandra Saunders said, “It was not an off-the-cuff remark. He said it three times ... Sack the bastard - we don't want him ... We do not want him as Aboriginal affairs minister because he is a racist.”

These are not isolated incidents - the nation is littered with reports of blatant racism being experienced by Indigenous Australians from all sections of society. Racist attitudes and actions are not the domain of a certain class of individual. Racism knows no boundaries.

As concerned parents we, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, shouldn’t throw our hands up into the air in a state of confusion or put discussion of racism with our children on the back burner. We must be proactive and raise awareness to what we know “nigger” to be (traditionally or otherwise): An evil cruel word along with the other sexist and religious words we refrain from public and personal use.

What we, as concerned parents, do have control over in today’s fast moving society is our children and perhaps to a lesser degree influence over our extended family members. As supporters of a fair and just society we need to teach our youth that it is OK to wear clothes of their popular American Hip Hop artists and imitate their mannerism. But please stress on them that under no circumstances can terms like “nigga” be seen as a sanitising version of “nigger” or that calling others boongs, gins, slops, dikes, googs etc be accepted as an expression of free speech.

The use of the word or its alternative does not lessen its hurt.

The author of the Love Thy Neighbours report should read and take note of the US religious and civil rights leader, Ralph Abernathy (1926-1990) when he says: "I’m sick and tired of black and white people of good intent giving aspirin to a society that is dying of a cancerous disease."